From the author of

From the author of

Fetch’s Mirroring Feature

Fetch has the ability to "mirror" the contents of one folder (or
disk, for that matter) to another, meaning that it copies the contents of the
folder to another folder. Normally, one folder is on your local disk
(your computer’s hard drive) while the other is on the remote
disk (the FTP server’s hard drive). Although either location can be the
source (the folder from which files are being copied) or the
destination (the folder to which files are being copied), when
you’re backing up your hard disk, the local disk is the source disk and
the remote disk is the destination.

NOTE

I also back up my blog’s contents to my local hard disk by using the
methods discussed here. In that case, the source is the remote disk (the FTP
server where my blog files reside) and the destination is my local disk (the
place to which I’m backing up these files).

What’s neat about the mirror feature is that it does not copy every
single file in the source location to the destination location. Instead, it
compares the two and copies only the files that don’t exist at the
destination, or that have been changed since the last time they were copied to
the destination. So unless the source folder has significant changes since the
last time it was mirrored to the destination, the mirroring process should be
quick and use very little bandwidth.

To set up the backup, set up the mirror feature by following these steps:

Use the Connection dialog that appears (see Figure 3) to set up the
connection to your FTP server. The settings should include the hostname or IP
address of the server, your username and password, and the path to the
destination folder. It’s very important that you also select the Add to
Keychain checkbox if you want to reuse the mirror information in the future.
I’ll get to that in a minute.

In the middle of the dialog box are two transfer direction buttons. Make
sure that the top one, which indicates that files will be copied from the local
disk to the remote disk, is selected. This setting indicates that the local disk
is the source disk and the remote disk is the destination disk. This step is
very important!

If you want the destination disk to include only those files that are in the
source disk when you use the mirror feature, you can select the Delete Stray
Items at Destination checkbox. However, I don’t recommend doing this
unless you’re sure that you want to delete existing files at the
destination.

At this point, the Mirror dialog box should look something like Figure 4.

Figure 4 The Mirror
dialog box, set up to copy the contents of a local folder to a folder on an FTP
server.

Click Save.

Use the resulting Save As dialog to name the mirror instructions document
and choose a disk location for it (see Figure 5). Be sure to turn on the Mirror
Automatically When Opened option—that tells Fetch to use the instructions
to mirror the source folder automatically when you open the document. Then click
Save.